Zero fail, p.18
Zero Fail, page 18
The other camp supported Knight’s chief rival—Bob Powis, a Vietnam vet who inspired followers with his clear directions and commanding presence. He had a macho swagger but was also respected for his keen investigative instincts. The ambitious supervisor had earlier headed up the sizable Los Angeles field office. He became known as “the West Coast director” because of his power base of loyal agents and independence from Knight. He had also been a driving force behind the Service’s early creation of the Counter Assault Team, a heavily armed group of marksmen who were supposed to swarm and suppress any attack on the president.
Before Reagan’s inauguration and the drama of the shooting, Knight had been examining ways to modernize the way the Service protected the nation’s leaders. A Michigan State graduate and beneficiary of a Princeton fellowship, he had a bit of a cerebral bent, and he turned to behavioral science in his search. Knight felt strongly that the Service needed to bolster its knowledge of the typical profile of would-be assassins and find them before they could strike. Knight had been sounding an alarm for years within the administration about the Secret Service’s dwindling intelligence on lurking killers. Because of rules adopted in the 1970s to bar the FBI from improperly spying on Americans, the Service in 1981 was receiving half as many leads as a decade before on people who made threats against the president.
Knight also tapped behavioral science to help him measure something he feared was dwindling in his overworked agency: employee morale. This concern made him an outlier in the history of the stoic Secret Service. He was the first director ever to commission an in-depth behavioral study of his workforce. Knight worried that agents drank to medicate themselves after stressful back-to-back shifts. He feared the job’s toll might also be straining marriages and families. He asked National Institute of Mental Health psychiatrist Frank Ochberg to spend a full year studying twelve hundred agents and interviewing many of them and their wives.
Ochberg saw the agents on the whole as “an admirably dedicated and mature group of people.” But the nation couldn’t expect them to be robots, he said.
Ochberg was impressed by the professionalism and devotion to duty that many agents shared. He arranged to interview one agent on a protective shift and was surprised to find he had a 105-degree fever and a rapid pulse.
“What are you doing here?” the psychiatrist asked.
“This is what we do,” the agent said flatly. “You never call in sick.”
Ochberg talked with agents who interviewed mentally ill people who had threatened the president. He felt many were more adept at building rapport with a stranger and gathering information than were professionals in his own field.
Ochberg’s unique ethnography of the Service was never made public. Ultimately, it concluded that alcohol abuse and marital strain plagued some agents but were not rampant. The study did, however, root out a surprising source of agents’ stress. The highest stress levels resulted not from any particular activity in the line of duty, but rather from the Service’s rigid, authoritarian management style.
An old guard of supervisors silenced discussion of the Service’s orders from on high and ignored younger agents’ questions about methods and procedures. The older agents of Kennedy’s era proudly shared stories of how many family Christmases and Thanksgivings they had missed. The younger agents, whose wives were less interested in marrying the Secret Service, felt the opposite. They considered it a sign of professional disrespect when bosses refused to give them flexibility to attend important family events.
“The attitude was, ‘Yours is not to wonder why. Yours is just to do or die,’ ” Ochberg said. “The newer agents were insulted at being treated like children.”
Armed with Ochberg’s research, Knight orchestrated the early retirement of several field office bosses who behaved more like tyrants than leaders. He also ended the hated cost-saving requirement that agents double-bunk in hotel rooms. That change was by far the most popular decision in Service history. Now agents could have some small privacy on the road, and sleep without waking to another man’s farts and snores.
While still in the midst of all these changes, Knight was aware he had a serious rival in Powis. In the late 1970s, the director had tried to exert some control over Powis by forcing him to return to Washington to be assistant director of investigations. On the surface, it appeared to be a promotion, but Powis didn’t want to be under Knight’s watchful eye and preferred to continue running his own fiefdom in California.
After he reluctantly accepted the headquarters job, Powis didn’t disguise his contempt for Knight, often calling him “that asshole” in front of subordinates. He also ignored Knight’s explicit directives and privately lobbied lawmakers to let the agency expand its powers into FBI turf to investigate bank fraud. Knight was furious: He wasn’t trying to start a turf battle with the FBI. As their battle grew more tense, a headquarters audit found that Powis misused confidential informant funds in Los Angeles to buy thank-you meals for agents working double shifts. It was a violation of the rules that made him a hero with some of the working stiffs. Knight didn’t think it was a major scandal, but felt it was a poor model for a high-ranking official to set. In the aftermath, Knight demoted Powis several levels down, sending him to work in the Washington field office. Powis agreed to retire in 1980, on the condition that Knight let him head up the office in his final year.
But when Ronald Reagan won the White House in November 1979, Powis and his allies ended up having a direct link to the throne. In Los Angeles, Powis had developed a friendly relationship with Governor Reagan’s team as he campaigned for president. Powis was especially close to two men Reagan considered confidants and friends: White House aide Ed Hickey and senior counsel Ed Meese.
As Reagan recovered from the shooting, Meese and Hickey quietly pushed to make Powis Knight’s boss, as an assistant deputy secretary of the Treasury overseeing the Secret Service. Knight and his camp pushed back, arguing it would unfairly politicize the office. But Knight’s camp lost. The White House chose Powis to take over in June at the Treasury position overseeing Knight.
In November, Knight publicly announced he was retiring at year’s end. He insisted that it had nothing to do with Powis’s rise. “Absolutely not true,” he told a reporter. “I realize that is the popular perception and from some perspectives even a logical or reasonable assessment. But it’s absolutely not true.”
Very few in the Service believed him. Knight had privately lobbied the White House, complaining to his deputies that he could never bow to Powis. Before Powis’s promotion, Knight had planned for his deputy, Myron “Mike” Weinstein, to inherit his job. He saw that that plan was now doomed. He chose to exit without raising a public ruckus.
The next week, the White House announced that John Simpson—one of Reagan’s very first bodyguards and a Powis ally—would be the new director of the Secret Service. He was sworn in Friday, December 4, in a small ceremony attended by Baker, Deaver, and Meese. All three men had been granted Secret Service protection in the wake of the shooting.
Soon the Reagans would celebrate their first Christmas season in the White House. They hosted an endless series of holiday parties at the mansion for donors, friends, volunteers, staff, agents, and even reporters. The Secret Service family normally looked forward to December, too, as a homecoming of sorts. Former directors and senior detail leaders returned for a Christmas luncheon and informal visits with their old friends.
This holiday season, however, the Service was implementing a headquarters purge. In a dramatic late-night meeting the week before New Year’s Eve, top aides to Powis and Simpson gathered to select preferred agents for key supervisory assignments. Agents dubbed the secretive session the Night of the Long Knives.
A handful of agents on duty that night at headquarters at 1800 G Street spotted an ominous list of names on the desk of Powis’s right-hand man, the deputy in charge of the Office of Investigations. On a yellow legal pad, the names of agents favored by Powis and Simpson were written on one side. Those considered loyal to Knight were on the other.
Starting that night, an estimated sixty agents were transferred into or out of plum headquarters jobs. “For the rank and file watching this, it had quite an impact,” one midlevel supervisor from that time recalled. “It was really kind of nineteenth-century management.”
Joe Petro, another rising young supervisor, had previously worked as a Treasury Department liaison for former director Knight and for his deposed heir, Deputy Director Weinstein. Though Petro had not actively rooted for either side, the agent assumed he was doomed. My career is over, he thought. I got the wrong game jersey on.
But Petro, a Vietnam combat officer, had also caught the eye of Powis because of his natural leadership skills. Powis had earlier asked Petro to temporarily help oversee training for the fledgling Counter Assault Team. While enjoying the holidays at his mother’s, Petro got a call from a deputy of the Powis-Simpson team. Did Petro want to join the new director’s staff as an agency spokesman? It was a position of trust. I guess my career’s not over! Petro thought.
Many others, though, learned they were out of favor. Agents and managers had banded together in power clusters with hopes of putting their own stamp on the Secret Service. The small close-knit family that agents had enjoyed under President Kennedy was a quaint memory. Small cliques had formed before, but now a civil war of rival bands had cut the Service in two.
Rank-and-file agents generally respected both Knight and Powis and many of their senior lieutenants. Several senior managers who picked sides in the epic 1981 battle for the directorship acknowledged the strengths of the other. “I can see the value in both of them,” said one former assistant director who backed Knight and fell out of favor afterward. “There was a great tension between the two of them. But they both had a vision of…a better Secret Service in different ways.”
In their battle for power, Powis had the advantage of a friendly, long-standing connection to both President Reagan and his closest aides dating back to Reagan’s time as governor in California—a connection that Knight sorely lacked. Powis’s ally John Simpson boasted an even stronger personal tie. He had led Reagan’s detail when he ran for president in 1968, and he was the person Mrs. Reagan wanted at her side in the hospital after the shooting in 1981. Reagan overturned the Secret Service director’s demotion of Powis and made him a top Treasury official. Not long after, Reagan named Simpson his new director of the Secret Service.
Every president has the right to choose his Secret Service director. But in the agency’s short history of protecting presidents, the White House had generally respected the Secret Service’s tradition of building its own internal, professional line of succession and had chosen directors from that cadre of contenders. Even in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination, a paranoid President Johnson had several times considered changing directors and not actually done it. The most startling disruption to the tradition of succession had taken place in 1948, when President Truman replaced a Secret Service director after Truman’s surprise reelection victory. The director at the time, James J. Maloney, had irked the president by dispatching many of his Secret Service detail agents to New York to begin shielding New York governor Thomas Dewey. The director had presumed, as had many election watchers, that Dewey would beat Truman. He sought to favor the man he believed would be his new boss, and lost his job when he guessed wrong.
President Reagan had bucked Secret Service tradition in a way that left some scars. His decisions on promoting Powis and Simpson had elevated one rival faction in the Secret Service over another. Reagan believed he was simply choosing the comfort of trusted lieutenants, and Simpson went on to be one of the Service’s most revered directors. But Simpson’s ascension sent a message throughout the agency, from the aspiring shift leader hoping to rise farther all the way down to the youngest, newest recruit: Pleasing a president had its rewards.
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REAGAN’S BRUSH WITH death led the entire White House political team to defer far more often to the Secret Service, at least for a while. Political aides, normally eager to get Reagan as close as possible to the public, now agreed to keep him several yards away.
But the natural tug-of-war between the White House and the Secret Service arose again from time to time. As the shooting receded in the rearview mirror, the White House angled for Reagan to have more closeup contact with voters. DeProspero said he went to work every week “knowing I had to be willing to get fired for requiring tight security…and angering senior staff.”
Though DeProspero stood just five feet seven, he could cow White House staff and his own agents with his wide shoulders and furrowed brow. He followed a rigid diet and weight-lifting routine throughout his career. As detail leader, he could bench-press twice the president’s body weight. “He was intimidating,” said Petro, who added he felt lucky to have him as a boss. “He’s not a big guy. But boy, I’ll tell you. He was like eight feet tall to me.”
DeProspero stared down the White House staff when Reagan visited the Midwest during campaign season. DeProspero said the Service was then receiving intelligence about terror groups trying to detonate truck bombs to kill world leaders. He warned Deaver that the Service would place tractor trailers at key intersections that Reagan passed on his Midwest trip. He said staff could not publicize the motorcade route, as they often did to bring out crowds.
“You know people like to see the president,” Deaver objected.
“Yes, Mike, but this is not the time,” he said.
But the night before they left, DeProspero’s advance agent called to warn him he suspected the White House was going to leak the route to the local press. DeProspero told him if that happened, they would use the alternate route. Sure enough, reporters had learned the path by the next morning. DeProspero notified his advance agent that they would use the alternate one.
“Who the hell do you think you are, changing the route like that?” Mike Deaver shouted at DeProspero when they reached the auditorium where Reagan would speak. “You had no right to do that.”
DeProspero repeated his concern about truck bombs and the risk of an explosion. As he spoke, he thought, I may have just blown it. This is what is going to cost me my SAIC position. DeProspero headed off to join the president. Reagan’s aides never broached the topic again.
DeProspero held briefings for new White House aides, hoping to make clear to them the life-and-death choices they might be pressuring a Secret Service agent to make just by asking them to relax a small rule. The responsibility for a president’s life, and the nation’s stability, hung over agents like a lead weight. “And I’m not attempting to have you share that responsibility,” he told the political staff. “But I want you to feel it.”
He reminded them of the advance staff in Dallas with Kennedy, in Laurel with Wallace; of Rick Ahearn, the White House advance staffer with Reagan at the Hilton. He described Ahearn calling out for a handkerchief to stanch the blood oozing from press spokesman Jim Brady’s forehead. The Secret Service and Ahearn had followed the standard security plans that day—but still had been devastated by the result.
“Because I can assure you the gentleman who headed up the advance at the Hilton Hotel still feels it!” DeProspero concluded.
DeProspero also liked to describe meeting the head of the South Korean president’s security detail just weeks after a tragic assassination attempt on his own president. He had met the security official in November 1983 while planning Reagan’s visit to Seoul to show support for the country’s fight against Communism.
South Korea’s president had been scheduled to lay a ceremonial wreath that October at a mausoleum in Rangoon in honor of an attack there on his citizens. His security team had trusted Burmese officials to check the safety of the site rather than insisting on sweeping the area themselves. President Chun Doo Hwan was running a few minutes late, but senior members of his government took their places on the risers. Just minutes before the president’s limo arrived, a bomb in the roof exploded. North Korean plotters had detonated it early by mistake. It killed fourteen senior South Korean officials, including four cabinet members and two of the president’s security agents. “I wish we had done what you do,” the South Korean security leader told DeProspero.
Speaking later to White House staff, DeProspero said, “I don’t want to minimize your job, but should you screw up royally, the consequence may be that you have bad press.” He added, “Should we, on the other hand, allow something like what happened in Rangoon to occur, it would definitely affect the entire world.”
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AN ALREADY PETITE Nancy Reagan dropped ten pounds and two dress sizes fretting about her husband after the shooting. And despite being a size 2, the First Lady kept a tight grip on her husband’s hulking security team. After March 1981, she became the most demanding voice in the detail leaders’ ears, but also the Service’s most dogged champion.
Mrs. Reagan worried after the shooting that she’d never shake the panic she felt each time her husband left the White House’s fenced compound. Visions of her husband being shot again tormented Mrs. Reagan on and off throughout the couple’s two terms in the White House. Like a passenger in a plane tossed by turbulence, she thought she could ensure a safe landing with concentration.
She developed a minor obsession with astrology to help her gauge risk. Working with an astrologist named Joan Quigley, the First Lady would scrutinize good and bad omens on days her husband had a public outing or a major trip scheduled. She feared for him when he traveled without her, because she had not been with him at the Hilton. And though she knew it was irrational, given that he was shot in Washington, the First Lady also grew especially jittery when he went out of town. Mrs. Reagan would summon Deaver after talking with her astrology adviser and suggest pushing the departure back a day or two or rescheduling an event. Deaver then alerted the president’s scheduler and the detail leader to the last-minute change in plans, often without any explanation.
